Selling Advice

Find a Personal Plate or Cherished Number

Looking for a personalised number plate for your vehicle? With prices that can start from only around £100, you're sure to find a plate that's right for you!

Private Number Plates

Private number plates – also called personalised number plates or cherished numbers - are a fantastic way to give your vehicle uniqueness and to make it stand out from the crowd.

They can also be surprisingly cheap, starting at less than £100.

Private number plates can be personal, spelling out your name or initials. Or they can have sporting themes, be related to your job or profession or can just be for fun – however you choose to stamp a unique identity on your plate.

A great place to begin to find the right plate for you is to couple your initials with a prefix letter (where the year letter is placed at the start of the plate). But remember, you cannot use a year letter to make your vehicle look newer than it actually is.

The concept of using a letter to denote the year of registration began in 1963, when a suffix letter at the end of the number plate was introduced. When all the letters ran out in 1983, the vehicle licensing authority switched to a prefix letter at the start of the plate.

The current system was started in 2001. The plate is made up of two letters at the beginning to show where the vehicle was registered. Then there follows two numbers which are the age identifier. These change every March and September. For example ‘12’ is for March 2012 and ‘62′ is for September 2012; then we will have ‘13′ for March 2013 and ‘63′ for September 2013; and so on. The final three letters are chosen at random.

For history buffs, the very first registrations began in 1903 – back then it was one or two letters and a number. Then in 1932 they added a third letter. But they gave no indication of date, hence they are known as dateless marks.

Still today in Northern Ireland they issue dateless plates which include a letter ‘I’ or ‘Z’ but no specific letter to identify the year. This is a great way to mask the year your vehicle was manufactured, as well as providing a vital source of cheap cherished number plates. Also you may be able to spell out your nickname - BIL, BAZ or DAZ, for example - although these combinations are usually more expensive.

If you have a bit more cash to spend, then you might be able to spell out your full name - for example BRY 17N or R11 CKS - but these personalised registration plates are likely to cost several thousand pounds.

Plates with a royal theme are currently popular. Both PR11 NCE and HA12 RRY recently went under the hammer for a combined total of more than £21,000.

And in the year of the London 2012 Olympics, you could have bought GO11 DEN or MEN 100M.